Obama's war and peace prize

[CHIMO]

Barack Obama heads to Oslo to receive his Nobel peace prize. In doing so he will be mocked by US conservatives for being concerned more with accolades than with the hard business of securing America. He will be lambasted by some on the left, in the wake of his decision to send more troops to Afghanistan, for being a "war-monger" who hypocritically dares to claim to be pursuing peace.

If there's a lesson to be applied here, it probably has less to do with Obama and more to do with the Nobel prize committee. Awarding peace prizes to sitting presidents can create a host of unintended troubles for the recipient.

Obama's prize clearly was awarded to him, and, by extension to the American people, as a gesture of goodwill and as a mark of hope for the future. A sort of "thank you" note from afar: to Obama for crafting a post-Bush rhetoric that could allow much of the world to once more turn to America for moral leadership, and for bringing millions of people who had always felt ignored into the political process and into the national discourse throughout the 2008 campaign; to the electorate for being willing to vote for a candidate cut from cloth so different from that of most presidents – the first black man to be elected to lead America, or, for that matter, any other first world democracy, a man with a background as a community organizer and civil rights lawyer.

The prize was more to do with aspirations; with a perception of new priorities at the highest echelons of US government; and with the sense that Obama's election in and of itself moved the US further along the road bridging racial divides than almost any other event in its history, than it was to do with concrete, specific, diplomatic accomplishments of the Obama administration to date.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/dec/08/obama-nobel-peace-prize-afghanistan